This morning, Missy Elliott dropped WTF, her first music video in almost eight years. Watching the high energy, hip-pop production, it’s a real relief to learn that Missy didn’t feel the need to reinvent her winning approach. Throughout her decade-spanning career, Elliott’s videos have featured surrealist sets, elaborate costume changes, and tight choreography often delivered by a rhythmically inclined child (I know you remember that lil chick from the Disney Channel crypt walking in pigtails and a powder blue tracksuit). WTF follows this fun formula and feels like a chilled-out retrospective of Missy’s most iconic music videos. The rapper effortlessly blends the serially stylish moments of her cyborg-inflected, Hype Williams-directed 90s epics with the fresh uniform dressing of her mid-00’s moments like Gossip Folks.
WTF‘s opening look is just the showstopper Missy needed to announce her return: a disco-ball inspired tracksuit paired with matching glitter lips, hoops, ski goggles, and kicks. It’s a Studio 54-meets-Daft Punk update to her usual triple-striped ensemble and according to The Fader, was created in collaboration with New York-based designer Kerin Rose Gold. The way the light bounces off its mirrored plates recalls the iconic light grid suit and bedazzled fly goggles from one of her most off-the-wall videos of all time: She’s a Bitch.
We then meet Missy’s new tiny dancer, one whose floor length micro-mesh jersey looks like she walked off the set of Ciara’s Givenchy-laden Got Me Good video. Missy follows this lil one’s lead and herself transitions from flashing lights to a sleeker black and white jersey situation. Her quick-stepping crew is outfitted in Biggie 97 beanies (sort of morbid when you consider it’s the year the Bed-Stuy rapper passed). She’s then joined by Beyoncé’s favorite dance duo, Les Twins, and flips the script between two comic-book inspired trackies while the identical brothers break it down behind her.
Missy’s later joined by puppet Pharrell. The pair of super producers have long been backed by adidas Originals, and WTF certainly isn’t short on trefoils and stripes. (But interesting side note: Elliott’s puppet rocks a cycling cap, bike-shorts and sneakers that appear to be Air Jordan IV’s — super similar to the look Spike Lee sported in his 1991 Jordan commercial advertising the same model). These puppet shots are interspersed with IRL dancers rocking bedazzled muay Thai boxing shorts, a chic remix of the baggy basketball bottoms often featured in Elliott’s Cookbook-era videos.
But it’s Missy’s final look that’s most situated in her boundary-pushing visual history: a crew of dancers hopping between cardboard cube cutouts clad in plastic bag zip-ups. Though transparent, the garments can’t help but recall one of Elliott’s earliest and most iconic music video looks: the trash bag jumpsuit from the title track off her debut solo album, Supa Dupa Fly. It’s this fusion that encapsulates what WTF‘s style is all about: an exciting blend of hip-hop heritage — including her own throwback threads — and sleek details that feel super now. Welcome back, Missy.
Credits
Text Emily Manning
Image via YouTube